Scientist at Work Blog: The Island Birds of Papua New Guinea

Jack Dumbacher, curator of ornithology and mammalogy at the California Academy of Sciences, writes from Milne Bay, Papua New Guinea, where he is studying island birds and their diseases.

Monday, Sept. 12

On Saturday afternoon, I arrived in Alotau, the provincial capital of Milne Bay, Papua New Guinea. It?s a very small town with a port, a market and just a couple of main streets. Milne Bay is a maritime province with more than 600 islands off the southeastern tip of New Guinea.

I?m here to survey island birds, and our goals are twofold: to document the avian diversity throughout the islands, and to discover and document the diseases they are carrying.

The islands of Milne Bay are relatively unknown scientifically, and only a small percentage of the islands have been surveyed for birds. It?s a perfect place to look for new species or unusual island forms, and we suspect many of their parasites will be new species or strains. Also, the islands are relatively pristine. There are few introduced bird species, and these are present in only a couple of areas. Although people live on many of the islands, their agricultural practices are not mechanized and they mostly have a traditional lifestyle. We should get a fair impression of the diversity of birds and parasites that are endemic to the region. This snapshot of the present biota will provide important baseline data for comparison to the future.

Our field techniques will be pretty simple. We hope to walk transects to both audibly and visually document which birds are present on each island. We will also use mist nets to capture birds. Each bird we capture will provide a blood sample for genetics and for looking for blood parasites like avian malaria. We will also take swabs of the mouth and cloaca, and these will be screened for viruses and other parasites. We will take photos of the birds we capture, and will keep a small number of complete specimens for the California Academy of Sciences and for the Papua New Guinea National Museum and Art Gallery.

This morning, the rest of our team arrived. They left Port Moresby at 6 a.m. and arrived in Alotau at 7. I had to find a pickup truck in town to get them and all of the gear.

We had quite a bit to accomplish. We needed to move all of our gear onto our boat, the Dalai. Then we needed to meet with local officials to receive our provincial research permits and discuss our work plans. I never really believe that the trip is going to go until I have all of my permits in hand.

Then we had shopping to do ? some last-minute first aid supplies, some malaria medicine, food for a month or so, and other odds and ends that are difficult to get at home or hard to transport. It is now 4 p.m. and we are still running fast to finish by sundown.

We plan to rest well tonight and set off early in the morning toward our first island destination. Which we choose to visit first will depend on the wind and weather.

Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=0ade5502597e6709791c08e2540644b3

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